Simple wedding glamour photo

Although there are many different ways and opinions on how to do this, saving time when using Photoshop is essential to me, and the rate at which I can make money. So I needed to come up with a simple way to do a glamour type glow. I find these types of photos very popular. I will be using this wedding photo, but surely you could use any that you like.

After you open the file that you want to add the glamour glow to, duplicate the layer. Layer/Duplicate Layer from the file menu. In your layers palette you should have a copy of your picture on the top of the stack. This is the layer we will be working with. Make sure that the layer is selected as shown by the dark gray color below.

Now we will need to add a blur to this layer. Select Filter/Blur/Gaussian Blur from the file menu. When the preview window comes up, set the radius to 16 pixels. You should end up with some blurry looking thing.

Making sure the top layer is still selected, reduce the opacity of the layer to 50%. This is the level that I like to use, but play around with different levels of opacity to suit the needs of your taste and your picture. Playing around with the settings is the best way to learn Photoshop.

Now you should have something that looks like this.

You could just leave it like this. I think it looks great left as is. If you want to take it one more simple step, try erasing a bit of the eyes and lips on the top layer that we used to create our glamour glow.

What I do to achieve this is to select the standard Eraser Tool. Then I make sure to select a soft round brush. Next I adjust the opacity and the flow of the brush to 50%. This will keep you from erasing too much. If you were to erase it all, the eyes pop out and look unnatural.

Now carefully erase around the eyes and lips a bit, zooming in and changing brush size as necessary.

This is an easy way to glamour up your wedding pictures. Here is the before and after.